The White Paper on Architecture for Digitisation

The Danish public sector moves quickly on the digital agenda. Data, IT systems, robots, apps, etc., help citizens, businesses and public sector employees solving their tasks. Digitisation and the use of new technology is one of the most important tools, when it comes to benefiting citizens and businesses as well as making the public sector more efficient and effective.

The Danish government, the municipalities and the regions have, with the common public sector Digital Strategy 2016-2020, set an ambitious target for the digitisation of the public sector. An essential challenge is to create a stronger coherence in the services of the public sector. Therefore, the three public sector actors have agreed to develop a common architecture as a basis for digital coherence and safe, efficient and effective sharing of data.

The White Paper on Architecture for Digitisation prepared by the common public Steering Committee for Data and Architecture lay out an architectural framework for IT development in the 33 initiatives of the Digital Strategy.

The White Paper builds upon a vision for a common public architecture: to offer citizens and businesses a secure, efficient, effective, coherent and focused service. This vision is supported by eight principles and a number of architectural rules. These will be applied in digitisation projects to create an architecture which will contribute towards coherence across digital solutions in the public sector.

Interoperability is at the heart of the White Paper placing it in a European and international context. The Danish approach builds on open international standards, supporting a Digital Single Market, common European building blocks, frameworks and reference architecture.
The common public architectural framework is anchored and coordinated in the Steering Group for Data and Architecture. Its dissemination and implementation is supported by a number of ongoing activities, key among them being counselling and peer-review of projects’ application of architecture.
The White Paper is published along with a draft guideline on concept and data modelling which reflects one of the architectural rules in the White Paper and currently open for public comments.